PernixData Raises $20 Million for Software-Defined Storage

Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for the data center industry:

PernixData closes on $20 million round. Software-defined storage platform company PernixDataannounced the close of an over-subscribed $20 million Series B financing. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) with additional support from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and industry leaders Mark Leslie , John Thompson and Lane Bess. The Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP) from PernixData disrupts the storage market by enabling virtualized datacenters to take advantage of an architecture that decouples storage performance from storage capacity. With this additional investment, PernixData will grow its sales and marketing globally, continue its ambitious R&D roadmap, develop a channel eco-system and accelerate go-to-market plans with leading players in the server and storage industries. “PernixData is solving one of the biggest outstanding issues in enterprise data centers: the cost and performance of storage,” said Matt Murphy of KPCB. “Pernix has the opportunity to do for storage what VMware did for compute. The technical team they’ve assembled for such an ambitious mission is unparalleled.”

Violin Memory speeds Oxford Press. Violin Memory announced it has helped Oxford University Press to improve its SAP IPM application performance by three times – cutting month end processing by two and a half days, and reducing average dialog response time; the time it takes from the first dialog request to the presentation of the final data – by 30 percent. Working with solution partner SCC Oxford Press selected the Violin Memory 6212 Flash Memory Array, an all-silicon shared storage system with industry-leading performance (up to 1 million IOPS) and ultra-low latency. “Most importantly we’ve removed the daily impact and the pressing risk to our month end close caused by the ever-lengthening batch processing times required as the data-set grew,” said Mark Harwood, SAP Lifecycle for Oxford University Press. “The decision to choose Violin Memory was made much easier by the professional approach shown by their team throughout our engagement, which has helped us to better understand all-flash memory arrays, an area of technology that is new to us.”

HP expands liquid cooling to Z820 workstations. Asetek announced that HP (HPQ) has expanded the availability of Asetek liquid cooling to include single processor Z820 workstations. Previously only available in dual CPU configurations, the more affordable single CPU Z820 with Asetek’s integrated sealed loop liquid cooling provides reduced system noise and increased productivity. The design win is expected to translate into an 8-10 percent increase in Asetek’s workstation business. “HP has always been on the cutting edge of workstation technology,” said Scott Chambers, Senior Director of Marketing at Asetek. “The expansion of Asetek liquid cooling within the Z820 line further validates Asetek liquid cooling as a valuable addition for improved productivity”.

About the Author

John Rath is a veteran IT professional and regular contributor at Data Center Knowledge. He has served many roles in the data center, including support, system administration, web development and facility management.

Related Stories

EMC World kicked off with the announcement of EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform, which is built for cloud environments and service providers, and designed to serve as the foundation for a modern storage architecture for future application deployments. Read More

Fusion-io (FIO) announced that it has acquired ID7, a specialist in software defined storage UK-based ID7 is the developer of SCST, a Linux storage software subsystem used by many storage vendors throughout the world. Read More

Previously reserved for extreme densities and supercomputers, liquid cooling continues to make strides in the data center. Asetek announced that its data center liquid cooling solutions are a part of the European Commission roadmap for moving to a low-carbon economy. Read More